Free Republic

Everyone grew up with someone who obnoxiously would recount everything you’d just gone through, to the people who were, like they weren’t – “Did you see that chick who started talking to you?” Yeah, I was talking to her. “My God, she just walked right up and started talking to you!” For some reason, Facebook thinks commercials feature people like this is a good way to get Congress to allow them to rewrite Internet regulations. If you’ve watched cable TV at all in the last month you’ve seen one of those stupid ads from Facebook calling for new Internet regulations....

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — In an exclusive interview with The Federalist, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis challenged the right to take a proactive stance on cultural issues, not just a defensive one. “Do you want to be the Harlem Globetrotters or do you want to be the Washington Generals? D.C. Republicans, a lot of them are my friends, but they’re like lovable losers,” he said. “They let the corporate media define the narrative and it’s like trying to fight your way out of a wet paper bag. You have to reject these narratives.”Recognizing Americans who “aren’t captive to the Acela corridor or...

Some conservatives seem unmoved by Big Tech’s threat to free speech and the free flow of information. They say: let the market work. But that, perhaps, is the essence of the problem. The tech companies didn’t achieve their monopoly positions in a free market. The U.S. government created a legal and regulatory environment that gave tech companies a massive advantage over their non-tech competitors. All of them received Section 230 protection, and Amazon had the extra benefits of tax-free internet sales, subsidized distribution through the post office, and exemption from liability for counterfeit and/or harmful products...

It has been said that “everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power.” An intriguing notion, but incomplete. Speech, especially the fight to control the speech of others, is also about power. How else to describe Facebook’s ban on users sharing the claim the COVID-19 virus came from a Chinese lab? The sudden lifting of the ban, following a White House plan to investigate the pandemic’s cause, only underscores the social media giant’s desire to restrict ­users’ speech. Now you can’t, now you can. ­Either way, it’s speech control. If just Facebook and others in Big Tech lusted...

A pair of technology trade groups are pushing back against Governor Ron DeSantis after he signed a measure (SB 7072) on Monday that aims to block companies like Facebook and Twitter from censoring politicians from their platforms. A top priority for DeSantis during the 2021 Legislative Session, the new law gives the Florida Elections Commission the power to fine media companies up to $250,000 a day for “de-platforming” any candidate for statewide office and $25,000 per day for de-platforming candidates for non-statewide offices. The lawsuit alleges that the new law violates the Constitution, noting that it infringes on the First...

China was the only major economy to grow during 2020, when the rest of the world—including the United States— suffered economically from the COVID-19 pandemic. China’s perception of the U.S.’s position is summed up by a frequent refrain of Chinese leaders: “the East is rising, and the West is in decline.” Further making their views toward the U.S. clear, China's most senior foreign policy official recently told senior U.S. officials that the U.S. isn't qualified to "speak from a position of strength" when criticizing China. This comes at a time when China has laid out plans to become a global...

oday, we’re launching new ways to inform people if they’re interacting with content that’s been rated by a fact-checker as well as taking stronger action against people who repeatedly share misinformation on Facebook. Whether it’s false or misleading content about COVID-19 and vaccines, climate change, elections or other topics, we’re making sure fewer people see misinformation on our apps. More Context For Pages That Repeatedly Share False Claims We want to give people more information before they like a Page that has repeatedly shared content that fact-checkers have rated, so you’ll see a pop up if you go to like...

In a recent piece at The Bulwark, Sonny Bunch puts into words a sentiment sensed by many for years, namely, that what once made social media so great has now made it unbearable. According to Bunch, social media’s original design as platforms for “debate culture” has descended into a toxic landscape of information silos where arguments are “dismissed in favor of agreement.” Rather than a boundless world of information and opinions, social media now serves to blind users from reality. This sorry situation, however, is precisely what Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein predicted in his 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation,...

A bit more evidence of how FB actively suppresses anti-vaxxing discussion.

English actor and comedian Russell Brand ripped the corporate media’s collusion with Silicon Valley tech giants as “troubling” in his latest video podcast Thursday featuring independent journalist Glenn Greenwald. In the episode, Brand and Greenwald highlight the media’s reflexive lurch to dispute blockbuster revelations surrounding the Biden family which emerged last fall in the heat of the presidential campaign. Twitter and Facebook notoriously censored stories related to the reporting and blocked links to the New York Post’s stories. “I’m not a pro-Republican person, I don’t see myself that way,” Brand said, “However, it seems to me – what reason is...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, on Monday signed a bill that allows "any person to sue Big Tech companies for up to $100,000 in damages" for "deplatforming." "This session, we took action to ensure that ‘We the People’ — real Floridians across the Sunshine State — are guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley elites," DeSantis said in a statement. "Many in our state have experienced censorship and other tyrannical behavior firsthand in Cuba and Venezuela. If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable." He...

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed legislation on Monday that reins back large tech giants while also supporting consumers who feel they have been wrongly discriminated against. At a ceremony in Miami, DeSantis signed the measure, which he described as the first of its kind in the United States. His office sent the following statement in response to the bill:

JUST IN - Florida Gov. DeSantis has just signed a bill into law that would allow everyday Floridians to sue Big Tech Platforms for monetary damages. https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1396861517065330689

Despite multiple attempts to pay for Facebook ads promoting a ‘Back the Blue’ event launching a bottle series dedicated to first responders, Loaded Cannon Distillery says they keep getting denied, so they will promote the event the old-fashioned way.

So far as I know, an author known as Z Man at an independent blog called Z Media coined the term “The Compound Eye” in a post of the same name. In his lexicon, the compound eye is a metaphor for the millions of surveillance cameras and other intrusive devices Big Tech and their cohorts have dreamed up to keep us all in line. And the metaphor is a good one at that. If we are going to resist these intrusions and regain some measure of privacy, we are on our own. Looking to Big Tech and our government to...

“Our profession today is unrecognizable,” says award-winning journalist Lara Logan. A former correspondent for CBS’ “60 Minutes” and now host of Fox Nation’s “Lara Logan Has No Agenda,” she’s been at the frontlines for years reporting on war zones, gang warfare, Benghazi, and beyond. And she’s seen the transformation of media from what it was meant to be, with many journalists blurring the lines between fact and opinion. “They're not journalists. They're political assassins, working on behalf of political operatives and propagandists,” Logan argues. What are the root causes of this shift? And how are a lot of media working...

The White House is ignoring the fact the SPLC inspired a would-be mass shooter and paid millions in damages after defaming innocent people as radicals. ========================================================================= Groups like ACLU, SPLC, and ADL are responsible for the calamity of Big Tech social media's rules and policies. Now imagine that net being cast across the entire United States population. ADVERTISEMENT The threat of targeting US citizens based on political leanings is a reality. Again, seeing as how under the Obama administration the IRS engaged in that practice. The tragic death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville is one thing both sides of the...

Conservative commentator Steven Crowder is taking YouTube to court over its content practices and policies which he says are used to silence conservative voices.The Daily Wire reports Crowder announced his lawsuit against the social media platform on Monday during his show “Louder with Crowder.”“As of last Thursday, May 14, my lawyer Bill Richmond and I have filed a notice of a lawsuit against YouTube and are seeking an injunction to prevent them, to stop them from currently deplatforming us,” Crowder said. “We’ve officially sent a notice of a lawsuit. Very different level – this is the big one, boys and...

Biden revokes Trump executive order that targeted Section 230

CAPTCHA, which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” first appeared in 1997 and has proliferated across the Internet, slowly morphing into the “Find the bicycle” challenges that we face today. Cloudflare, who obviously has money riding on anything that makes it easier to sift robot attackers from humans, is proposing a new service that uses hardware keys to confirm your existence. The most popular model, the Yubikey, is a little dongle that connects to your computer and sends a special code when you touch a conductive surface. In this case, the USB key...